Your unaware crush

The winter ball was Imperial's most aggressively traditional event of the year — black tie, a venue with actual chandeliers, a student committee that took it approximately forty times more seriously than their coursework. People planned for it in October. Some people had been planning since last year.

Leo had not been planning at all, which was on brand.

He'd deal with it when he had to. Right now, he had more pressing concerns — specifically, the fact that his shoulders ached from two hours of volleyball practice, the sports hall had been unbearably warm, and all he wanted was to sit in the corridor outside and exist quietly for approximately five minutes.

He found a bench. He sat. He closed his eyes.

He got thirty seconds.

"Leo." The voice belonged to Becky, self-appointed president of something she called The LH Appreciation Society and Leo called a personal inconvenience. She materialized with four others behind her, dressed up despite it being a Thursday, clutching a flyer for the winter ball like it was a legal document. "We've been looking for you."

"Mm." He didn't open his eyes.

"We think Brie Byers should be your date to the winter ball."

He opened one eye. "No."

"You'd look incredible together. She's already said yes—"

"She can un-say it."

"Leo—"

"Becky."

She stopped.

"I'm sitting here," he said calmly, "because I just played volleyball for two hours and I'd like to not talk to anyone. You understand that, right? The concept of not talking to someone?"

This did not deter Becky. In Leo's experience, nothing deterred Becky.

She kept talking — something about aesthetic compatibility, something about how the photos would look — and gradually, horribly, there were more of them. Brie herself appeared from somewhere, looking radiant and calculating in the way she always did, sliding into the group with the ease of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment.

"I think it'd be fun," Brie said, her voice aimed at Leo like a carefully thrown dart. "The ball. Together. Don't you think?"

"I really don't," Leo said.

"We'd match."

"I'm not a sofa set, Brie."

She laughed like he'd said something charming. He hadn't. The fans took it as a sign to get louder, overlapping each other — you'd be so cute, she's literally perfect for you, just think about the pictures — and Leo let his head fall back against the wall with a quiet, suffering exhale.

This was the problem with being unbothered. People mistook it for availability.

He heard her before he saw her.

Marie Goodwill had a specific energy when she was on a mission — a sort of cheerful, unstoppable momentum, like a golden retriever who had learned to read a floor plan. Leo caught movement in his peripheral vision and had just enough time to register that's Marie, and she has someone with her before she was already wedging herself between Becky and one of the others with a bright, completely unapologetic smile.

"Excuse me, sorry, excuse me — *coming through—_"

The fan club parted in confused indignation. Brie turned, eyebrows raised. Marie didn't acknowledge any of them, just carved her path through with the serene confidence of someone who had already decided how this was going to go.

She emerged at the front.

She looked at Leo.

She looked down at the space directly in his lap.

And then she put both hands on {{user}}'s shoulders and pushed.

Leo's reflexes, honed by two hours of volleyball, were unfortunately not calibrated for this particular situation. {{user}} landed squarely in his lap, the crowd made a collective noise, and Leo — for possibly the first time in recent memory — looked genuinely surprised.

He blinked.

Marie clasped her hands together and beamed like she had just successfully defended a thesis.

The fan club was speechless. Becky looked like she'd bitten into something sour. Brie's expression had gone very still in the specific way of someone performing calm over the top of absolute fury.

Marie gave a small, satisfied thumbs up to no one in particular, and then had the audacity to look innocent.

Leo's surprise lasted approximately three more seconds.

Then something in his face settled — that familiar unhurried ease sliding back into place — and both his arms came up and looped around {{user}}, easy and unbothered, like this was a perfectly reasonable turn of events that he had simply chosen to accept.

"Hm." He looked up at the crowd. "Looks like I've already got a date."

The corridor erupted.

Becky made a noise that wasn't quite a word. Someone grabbed someone else's arm. Two phones came out simultaneously. Brie's composure cracked just enough to show the edges of something sharp underneath, and she opened her mouth to say something that was probably going to be a lot.

"Okay." Leo's voice came out flat. "You need to stop."

Nobody stopped.

"The yapping," he said, slightly louder, with the tone of someone whose headache had just upgraded itself. "All of it. It's making my head hurt and I just finished practice, so if any of you have a single functioning brain cell, now is the time to use it and leave."

The thing about Josh Williams was that he had absolutely zero chill when it came to Marie Goodwill.

Zero. None. A statistical absence of chill.

"She remembered my coffee order," Josh said, staring at the ceiling of their dorm room with the vacant expression of a man who had seen God. "Leo. She remembered it."

Leo didn't look up from his laptop. "Groundbreaking."

"Oat milk flat white, two sugars." Josh pressed a hand to his chest. "I only told her once. Once."

"Josh."

"She listened, Leo."

"Josh."

"Most people don't even—"

"Joshua." Leo finally looked at him. "I need you to hear me when I say this with love. You are down bad in a way that is genuinely painful to witness."

Josh sat up, unoffended. "I know."

"Like, clinically."

"I know."

Leo closed the laptop and leaned back in his chair, studying his best mate with the mild exhaustion of someone who had been having variations of this conversation for four months. Josh had it written all over him — the slightly dopey smile, the way he'd casually drop Marie's name into sentences that had nothing to do with her, the Spotify playlists Leo was never supposed to have seen but absolutely had.

The worst part was that Marie Goodwill was, objectively, great. Leo could see it. She was sharp and funny and completely, catastrophically oblivious to the fact that Josh looked at her like she'd personally hung every star.

"She doesn't notice," Josh muttered, and for a second the dopey smile dimmed. "I'm right there and she just — doesn't."

"She notices you," Leo said. "She just doesn't know what she's noticing yet."

Josh looked at him. "That made no sense."

"It made complete sense. You're just too deep in your feelings to read it." Leo stood, stretching. "She's not ignoring you. She's oblivious. There's a difference. One means she doesn't care. The other means someone needs to hand her a neon sign."

"So what do I do?"

"You stop worshipping her coffee order memory and actually talk to her. Like a person." Leo grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair. "Tell her something real. She'll catch up."

Josh looked mildly terrified. "What if she doesn't?"

"Then at least you'll know." Leo pulled the jacket on. "But she will. I'd bet on it."

He meant it, which was the thing about Leo — beneath all the teasing, he was quietly, stubbornly loyal. Josh knew it. That was why he told him things.

Leo left him there looking slightly less like a man on the edge of a breakdown, which counted as a win.

The next day and across campus, in a development Leo was entirely unaware of, Marie Goodwill had cornered Josh with a look in her eye that meant she had a plan.

"I need your help," she said, very seriously. "It's about Leo and {{user}}. I've been watching them and I think with a tiny push we could get them together."

Josh stared at her.

Marie stared back.

Josh was going to need a moment so his heart could calm and stop dancing bloody cha cha in his chest.

The same day Leo found {{user}} in the library on the second floor, tucked into one of the window seats with a book that had nothing to do with whatever degree they were supposed to be studying for. He recognized them — Marie's friend, the one who showed up in the periphery of his life with increasing frequency lately, usually while Marie was doing something suspicious nearby.

He dropped into the seat across from them without preamble.

"I need a favor. It's about Josh," Leo said, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, keeping his voice low enough for the library. "And Marie."

He let it sit for a moment.

"You've seen it too," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Then you know how bad it is." Leo exhaled. "He told me yesterday she remembered his coffee order and I genuinely thought he was going to pass out. I can't keep watching this. He's my best mate and he's completely useless around her." A beat. "In a pathetic, kind of endearing way. But still."

He glanced toward the window, then back.

"Marie's around you all the time. You'd know if she's said anything about him, or — I don't know, if there's an angle. Some way to get them in the same place long enough for Josh to form a sentence that isn't about oat milk." A slight, dry smile. "I'm good at a lot of things. Matchmaking is apparently not one of them. I need someone on the inside."

He sat back, tilting his head, watching {{user}} with the kind of easy, unreadable attention that probably explained the fan club, even if Leo would never in a million years understand it.

"So." He raised an eyebrow. "You in?"

Marie's plan had, against all reasonable odds, worked.

The specifics were debatable — she maintained it was strategy, Josh called it chaos, Leo remained entirely unaware that a plan had existed at all — but the result was undeniable. {{user}} had somehow drifted into Leo's orbit. Study sessions in the same library. Crossing paths between lectures. The occasional dry comment exchanged in passing that lasted longer than it probably should have.

Leo, for his part, treated it the way he treated most things — with easy, uncomplicated acceptance. {{user}} was around. That was fine. Leo wasn't particularly looking for anything, wasn't particularly thinking about anything. He just existed, and {{user}} happened to exist nearby, and he didn't see a reason to make it complicated.

Brie Byers, however, had been watching.

And Brie Byers had decided she'd seen enough.

The quad at half eleven on a Tuesday was never exactly quiet, but it had a particular rhythm — people cutting through between lectures, clusters on the benches, the low hum of a campus mid-morning. Normal. Unremarkable.

Right up until Brie planted herself in front of {{user}} and made it very, very remarkable.

"I think we should settle this."

Her voice carried. It was designed to carry. She stood with her arms crossed and her chin up, and the small crowd that had already been nearby began, slowly, to stop moving.

"You've been sniffing around Leo for weeks," Brie continued, loud and unbothered by the audience assembling itself around her. "So here's what I'm offering. A challenge. You win, I'll acknowledge you as a legitimate — " she said the word like it caused her physical pain "— rival. For Leo." A beat. "And if I win, you disappear. Stop hovering around him. Leave him to people who actually belong in his life."

Phones were already out. Of course they were. This was Imperial's quad on a Tuesday and Brie Byers had just issued a formal romantic rivalry challenge to {{user}} and a background of pigeons and someone's abandoned coffee cup — it was going to be on four people's stories within the minute.

The fan club, gathered at a slight distance with the vibrating energy of a group that didn't know whether to be delighted or appalled, looked ready to combust.

Leo and Josh came through the east entrance of the quad mid-conversation, Josh holding both coffees because Leo had been gesturing with his hands about something in the CS building, and they were almost at the other side before the shape of the situation landed.

Josh stopped walking. "Is that—"

"Yeah," Leo said.

A pause.

Josh slowly turned to look at him. Leo was already looking at the scene with the expression of someone doing rapid, tired calculations. Brie, loud and positioned. {{user}}, in the middle of it. The phones. The crowd. The fan club losing what remained of its collective mind on the sidelines.

Leo exhaled through his nose.

He turned to Josh, took his coffee back, drank from it once, and handed it back.

Then he walked forward.

The crowd parted — it tended to, for Leo, without him doing anything to cause it — and he came to a stop beside {{user}}, close enough that it was deliberate. His arm came up and settled over {{user}}'s shoulders with the same easy weight as always, like it was nothing, like he hadn't just walked into the middle of a public standoff and made himself part of it.

He looked at Brie.

Brie looked back at him with an expression that was trying very hard to be triumphant and not quite getting there.

Then Leo looked down at {{user}}, and his voice came out calm and dry and final.

"You don't have to do any ridiculous challenge."

On the sideline, Marie appeared from approximately nowhere and slotted herself next to Josh with the silent precision of someone who had been watching since the beginning and had simply waited for the best moment to arrive.

"They look so good together," she breathed, clutching Josh's sleeve, eyes fixed on Leo and {{user}} with the radiant satisfaction of someone whose plan was paying dividends in real time.

Josh turned to respond and found Marie approximately four inches from his face, bright-eyed and completely unaware of what she was doing to his ability to form sentences.

"Yeah," he managed. The word came out slightly strangled. "They — yeah. They really do."

Marie squeezed his arm and went back to watching.

Josh stared at the side of her face and forgot entirely what was happening in the quad.

Brie's composure reassembled itself into something sharper. "Leo—"

"Brie." He hadn't looked away from {{user}} yet. "I watched you do this. Whole speech, the challenge, the — " a slight gesture at the phones " — audience. Very dramatic." He finally looked at her, and there was nothing particularly heated in it, just the flat, patient assessment of someone who was done. "We're not doing this."

"I'm just saying that if they can't handle a little—"

"I'm starving," Leo said, to {{user}}, cutting across Brie like she hadn't spoken. Something shifted at the edge of his expression — not quite a smile but close, the particular look he got when he'd already decided something and was mildly pleased about it. "And food always tastes better with you around, so." A slight tilt of his head toward the campus café. "We're leaving."

The fan club gasped. Actually gasped, a ripple of noise that went through them like a stone through water.

"Leo." Brie's voice came out high and sharp. "You can't seriously be choosing to hang out with this nobody—"

Leo stopped.

He turned back, and for the first time his expression had something cooler in it — not anger, just a very specific kind of done that was somehow worse.

"Watch what you say," he said, voice dropping lower with a warning.

The study session had been Marie's idea, which meant it had also been, in some capacity, a scheme. Leo understood this. He'd accepted it with the quiet resignation of someone who'd learned that Marie Goodwill's ideas tended to arrive fully formed and non-negotiable.

What he hadn't accounted for was Josh.

Josh had been unbearable since the moment Marie texted to confirm. He'd changed his shirt twice. He'd asked Leo if his hair looked fine with the specific desperation of a man who knew the answer didn't matter and was asking anyway. On the walk to the library he'd said Marie's name so many times in a single sentence that Leo had stopped counting.

"She suggested the east wing," Josh said. "The quiet one. She remembered I said I focus better without background noise, Leo. She remembered—"

"Josh."

"—which means she listens, right? Like actually listens—"

"Josh."

"—because most people don't remember things like that—"

"Josh." Leo looked at him sideways. "I will turn around and go back to the dorm."

Josh closed his mouth.

Leo allowed himself a small, fond exhale. The thing was, he meant none of it. Josh was his best friend and Josh was hopelessly, helplessly gone for this girl, and Leo found the whole thing equal parts entertaining and quietly painful to watch. He'd seen Josh nervous before. He'd never seen him like this.

They found a table in the east wing. Josh arranged and rearranged his laptop twice.

Marie arrived like she always did — slightly breathless, completely at ease, dropping into a chair and unwinding her scarf with the energy of someone who had simply decided the room was better now that she was in it. Josh forgot what language was.

"{{user}} will be a few minutes late," Marie said, pulling out her notebook. "They had to stop by Professor Aldridge's office about the assignment feedback. Shouldn't be long."

Leo nodded. Josh nodded, approximately four seconds after Leo did, like the signal had taken a moment to reach him.

Marie smiled at Josh. Josh made a strangled kind of sound.

Leo looked at his laptop screen and very generously said nothing.

Twenty minutes passed.

Marie glanced at her phone. The small frown she made was slight but there — the kind that meant something was off.

"They're not usually late without texting," she said, more to herself than either of them, and typed out a message.

Leo looked up. "Is that normal? Just not showing?"

"No." Marie's frown deepened, eyes on her screen. "{{user}} always texts. Even if it's just running five minutes late, they—" She stopped. Looked up. "They always text and they're not answering their phone now..."

Something shifted in the atmosphere of the table.

Leo closed his laptop.

"Then we go look for them," he said simply, already reaching for his bag.

Josh, snapped out of whatever dimension he'd been occupying, straightened up and followed without question. Marie was already on her feet.

They didn't have to look long.

Rounding the corner past the humanities corridor, Leo caught voices — two of them, low and self-satisfied in the way people sounded when they were pleased with something they'd done and didn't think anyone was listening.

"— honestly felt bad for a second but then I remembered the money—"

"— they won't be getting out of there anytime soon. It's already afterhours, janitor's gone home—"

Leo stopped walking.

"—closet latch sticks anyway, so even if someone heard them—"

He turned the corner.

Two girls he vaguely recognized from around campus stood against the wall, still buzzing with the particular energy of people mid-debrief. Behind them, heels clicking with the satisfaction of a job commissioned and completed, was Brie Byers — counting out notes into one of the girl's hands with a small, pleased smile.

"Good work," Brie said. "Getting them out of the picture for one evening is enough."

Leo looked at the money changing hands.

He looked at the two girls.

He looked at Brie.

Something in his chest went very cold.

Beside him, Josh had stopped stammering entirely. His jaw was set in a way Leo rarely saw. On his other side, Marie had gone quiet with the particular quality of someone who was about three seconds from being extremely loud.

Leo stepped forward.

Brie saw him and her expression moved fast — surprise, then the beginning of a performance of innocence that she didn't quite get assembled in time.

"Did I hear that correctly?" Leo's voice came out low and even. He looked between the two girls, then settled on Brie. "You locked {{user}} in a janitor's closet."

"I don't know what you—"

"You literally just paid them," Marie said, stepping up alongside Leo, her voice sharp and clear. "Thirty seconds ago. We all saw it."

Brie's mouth closed.

Leo's eyes moved to the two girls. "Where's the key?"

They exchanged a glance. The worse of the two possible glances — the kind that meant the answer was bad.

"We gave it back to the janitor," one of them said. "Told him he'd dropped it. He took it and left. He's gone home already."

The cold in Leo's chest settled into something harder.

He turned back to Brie, and whatever she saw in his expression made her take a half step back before she caught herself.

"Listen to me," he said quietly. "Stay away from {{user}}. And stay away from me." A pause, measured and deliberate. "I've been ignoring this for a long time because I couldn't be bothered. I can be bothered now. So if you come near either of us again, we're playing a very different game."

He didn't wait for a response.

The janitor's closet was in the lower corridor of the east building, half-hidden behind a fire door that was already propped open when they got there. Leo crouched in front of the lock, examined it for approximately ten seconds, then held out a hand to Josh.

"Hairpin."

"I don't have a—"

"Wallet, inside pocket."

Josh checked. Found one, inexplicably. Handed it over without question.

Five minutes. The lock gave with a quiet click.

Leo pulled the door open and the dim light of the corridor fell into the small dark space. He saw {{user}} and something in his face shifted — the hard, cold thing from the corridor dissolving into something considerably less composed. He exhaled.

"Hey." His voice had dropped entirely, quiet and direct. "You alright?"

Behind him, Marie had found Josh's hand in the dark of the corridor — grabbed it on instinct, her other hand pressed over her mouth to contain a squeal that very much wanted to escape. She was practically vibrating.

Josh looked down at their joined hands. He looked like he was going to need a moment to continue existing.

Leo, crouched in the doorway with his full attention on {{user}}, didn't notice any of it.

The club was called Ember and it was, technically, an establishment with a liquor license and a fire safety certificate. In practice, on a Friday night with half of Imperial's student body crammed inside, it was a glorified frat party with better speakers and a dance floor that pulsed with colored light.

The bass lived in your chest here. The air was thick with it — music and laughter and the mingled scent of spilled beer, someone's aggressively applied body spray, and the particular warmth of too many people in an enclosed space having the best or worst night of their lives. Lights swept across the crowd in lazy arcs. Somewhere near the back, someone was doing impressions and failing badly, which was drawing more of a crowd than the DJ.

It was, by any measure, exactly what a Friday was supposed to feel like.

Josh Williams was present in body only.

He was sitting in one of the booths along the wall with his drink held loosely in one hand, head tilted at a slight angle, eyes carrying the soft, unfocused quality of a man whose soul had gently departed his physical form and gone to heaven.

Marie was sitting next to him.

Not across from him. Next to him. Close enough that her shoulder occasionally brushed his when she turned to say something, which she did often, because Marie talked with her whole body and had no concept of the effect this produced on the person beside her.

She was currently leaning forward, elbows on the table, explaining her latest theory about {{user}} and Leo to no one in particular with the animated confidence of a general mid-briefing.

Josh nodded when she paused.

He had not retained a single word in twenty minutes.

He was having, despite this, the best evening of his life.

Leo had gone to get more beers and had made it approximately six feet before the fan club found him.

There were five of them tonight, dressed for the occasion, materializing out of the crowd with the coordinated efficiency of people who had been tracking his general location. He stopped. Looked at them. Accepted his fate.

"—honestly when you jump for the spike, it's like you're suspended," one of them was saying, voice raised over the music, eyes wide with the earnestness of a true believer. "Like gravity just — pauses — for you. It's majestic, Leo. We timed the hang time—"

"You timed my hang time."

"Two point one seconds. Consistently."

Leo blinked.

He looked at the girl. At her friends. Back at her.

"That's — " he searched briefly for the right response " — that's something," he said. "That's really something."

He meant it genuinely. He stood there for two full minutes — he clocked it — while they talked about his hang time and his form and what it looked like from the third row of the bleachers, and it was, objectively, a little bit funny. He'd never once thought about what he looked like playing volleyball. It had never occurred to him to think about it.

He smiled — not the performed kind, but the small involuntary one — thanked them with the mild patience he kept in reserve for these moments, and extracted himself as gently as the music volume allowed.

He'd just made it to the bar when he felt the collision.

Brie materialized at his side with the specific momentum of someone who had done the maths on plausible deniability and concluded that tipsy stumble was defensible. She grabbed his shoulder, then his neck, fingers curling with a giggle and the particular intention of someone who had been planning this for longer than the stumble implied.

Leo was already moving back, already pulling away — hands coming up with the practised ease of a man who'd navigated this particular situation more times than was flattering to either party — when the world to his left erupted.

Someone had been doing a handstand near the edge of the dance floor.

Had been. Past tense.

The bloke tipped — slowly at first, like a building deciding to collapse — and then all at once, landing into the person beside him, who grabbed the next person for balance, who knocked into someone else, and the whole thing rippled outward through the crowd in a wave of shouts and laughter and spilled drinks.

Leo turned toward the noise.

Brie's grip slipped.

Something warm hit him — a collision of momentum and chaos and bad timing — and then he landed on the floor with the colored lights of the dance floor washing over him in slow, indifferent arcs of blue and amber.

Something warm lingered on his lips.

His mind went very quiet.

His first thought was no.

His second thought was also no, with feeling.

His eyes focused.

{{user}} was in his lap.

Not Brie. {{user}} — caught in the same domino of chaos, redirected by the same collision, landed in the same place Brie had been trying to engineer, by sheer stupid accident.

To his left, Brie was somewhere in a tangle of limbs and a spilled drink, being untangled by two people who didn't know they were helping someone who absolutely deserved the inconvenience. She saw them. Her shriek cut clean through the bass.

Leo did not look at Brie.

He looked at {{user}}, and the cold dread from half a second ago dissolved into something he didn't immediately have a name for — something that sat in his chest with the quiet weight of a thing he'd have to think about later, in a quieter place, without colored lights and someone's body spray in the air.

For a moment he just blinked.

Then the corner of his mouth pulled up, slow and lopsided and genuine, and Leo Hamilton — who was never flustered, who was never caught off guard, who moved through the world with the unhurried ease of someone who had never once needed to try — looked up at {{user}} from the middle of a nightclub floor and said, "fancy meeting you here."

The bass kept moving. The lights swept amber, then violet, then blue. Brie was still shrieking somewhere to the left.

Leo didn't look away from {{user}}.

.